Carlyle at His Zenith (1848-53)

THE same James Dodds, whom Carlyle had persuaded
to stick to the law for a living instead of going into
journalism, had come to London in 1846 when he was thirty-
three, and had prospered well,--it was a rush of Scottish
railway business that had brought him to work as a Parliamentary agent; and he continued to be a frequent caller
at Carlyle's till some time in the fifties.1 He could, and
did, boast that 'he had heard from Mr. Carlyle's lips the
substance of many of The Latter-Day Pamphlets before they
were published.'

Before he came to London his spiritual evolution was
complete. He never escaped from the cage of the Bible,
and after fluttering about a bit, settled on his perch, an
evangelical Christian, tho more like an old Scotch Covenanter
than a modern Englishman.

At Cheyne Row, as among sensible people in Scotland for
many generations, the rule was silence about religion in the
presence of believers; and Dodds made many friends there,
--John Carlyle and Procter, Craik and Lewes. He became
a champion of Mazzini, and a friend and unpaid legal adviser
of Leigh Hunt. In short, the prosperous lawyer remembered well the dreams of his youth, and gave his leisure to
lecturing and writing at large, doing Lays of the Covenanters
in answer to Aytoun Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, both
famous then and now forgotten, and lecturing often and
well on The Fifty Years' Struggle of the Scottish Covenanters. He made a book of that title out of his lectures, and
it ran to many editions; but what is most interesting here is
this description of Carlyle at home, which he wrote for the Dumfries Courier.

'The tongue has the "sough" of Annandale, an echo of
the Solway. A keen, sharp, singing voice, in the genuine

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